Vermont's Burlington, shown here, is one of nearly three dozen places named Burlington around the United States. / Free Press File

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Free Press Staff Writer

The seaside English town of Bridlington, shown here, was once known as Burlington and now may claim a number of namesake cities in the United States, including Burlington, Vt. / Courtesy of aboutbridlington.co.uk

According to an unofficial ranking by the U.S. Census Bureau, “Burlington” is the 38th most common place name in the United States, with a total of 34. (“Union” is No. 1, with 118, and “Washington,” No. 2, with 96.) What gave rise to all those Burlingtons?

Our Burlington gets credit for some of the naming rights, thanks mostly to the diaspora of Vermonters who fled their home state in the 19th century, but by no means for all.

Some of the Burlingtons don't even know why they're called Burlington, and others can't be sure because of competing, and even amusing, explanations.

Even our Burlington — yes, the one in Vermont— has two competing explanations.

One theory, popularized in the 19th century, is that the settlement was named for a Quaker family of New York landowners named Burling.

The other theory is that Burlington was named in honor of the earl of Burlington. By this account, New Hampshire’s governor, who conferred the Burlington name in 1763, was currying favor with the powerful, well-connected Boyle family back in the home country. (The earl of Burlington title had belonged to the Boyles for nearly a century.)

For the purpose of this story, we're going to go give more attention to the earldom explanation, partly because the Burling theory is peremptorily dismissed by an authoritative source, "The Vermont Encyclopedia."

“New Hampshire’s Governor Benning Wentworth did not name the New Hampshire grants town of Burlington after the New York Burling family, as is commonly assumed,” declares the encyclopedia.

Why has the Burling theory persisted?

"Patriotic 19th-century Burlingtonians and their heirs would pick a humble Quaker for their hometown's namesake over a British earl any time,” wrote John Duffy, co-author of the encyclopedia, in an email, “even if the humble, but wealthy, Quaker made his fortune in land speculation."

Bridlington and the earldom

Another reason to dwell on the earldom explanation is that it takes us back to Britain, the source of all the nomenclature in question. There are no cities in England officially named Burlington. There is, however, a Bridlington, in East Yorkshire, which seems to have Burlington as a nickname.

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Bridlington, a seaside resort, has been known by many other names in its long history. Take it from the East Yorkshire Local Historical Society, which wrote in an email:

“Place names and personal English names have been subject to numerous variations until the modern age. In official records there are about 20 different spellings of Bridlington…”

The most common is Bridlington, first mentioned in the year 1119. Other variants have included Berlinton, Brilinton, Brillintona, Berlington, Breddelinton, Brellington, Bolington, Byrlyngton and Burdlington. Burlington appears in 1651.

“Many of Bridlington’s older residents still often refer to their town as Burlington or Bolli’ton,” write Nigel and Carol Charlton, proprietors of a Bridlington inn called Burlington Quay. “Why? There is no single definitive answer and there is much debate as to the origins of the name Bridlington itself.”

As it happens, Bridlington/Burlington has a newspaper called The Bridlington Free Press, founded in 1859.

As for the earldom: The title was first given to Richard Boyle in 1665. According to the National Dictionary of Biography, he was a wealthy man of high standing in the royal court who was rewarded for past services to the Stuarts, particularly the queen mother, Henrietta Maria. (One of his younger brothers was Robert Boyle, a natural philosopher and chemist best known for “Boyle’s Law.”) He owned land in Yorkshire but not in Bridlington.

Henrietta Maria had a connection to Bridlington. She disembarked there when she returned from a year overseas early in the civil war, and stayed there briefly, according to the historical society, which adds: “Why the Earls were called Burlington rather than Bridlington is anyone’s guess, although Burlington seems to have been a common name for Bridlington in that period.”

In any case, Richard Boyle’s residence in London, acquired in 1668 after he had been named the first earl of Burlington, was known as Burlington House. Purchased by the British government in the 19th century, it houses five “learned societies,” including the Royal Society of Chemistry.

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The earl title went extinct in the mid-18th century when the Boyle family ran out of male heirs, but it was revived about a century later for the Cavendish family (related to the Boyles via marriage) by Queen Victoria.

The current earl of Burlington is William Cavendish, son of the duke of Devonshire. He’s a photographer who does business under the name Bill Burlington.

Bill Burlington did not reply to an email from The Burlington Free Press.

The crest of the earl of Burlington, by the way, features a knotted snake. It can be seen in “Fairbain’s Book of Crests,” Volume 1.

But back to geography. Bridlington/Burlington figures into North American namings:

In Canada, the earliest use of the Burlington name was in a royal proclamation of 1792, when the body of water at the western tip of Lake Ontario was dubbed Burlington Bay. Why?

“It is believed that Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, John Graves Simcoe, was reminded ofBridlington Bay in his native Yorkshire, England when he travelled through this area,” writes a reference librarian in Burlington, Ontario. Other landmarks named Burlington followed, most notably the village of Burlington. That community kept the name but the bay is now called Hamilton Harbour.

As for Burlington, N.J., first settled in 1677, according to a local historian who wrote a book about place names: “All authorities agree that the town was named after the English village of Bridlington, Yorkshire.”

Burlington, N.Y., got its name from Judge William Cooper (father of James Fenimore), in honor of the place he came from when he first visited in 1786 — Burlington, N.J.

The New Jersey Burlington also gets credit for Burlington Coat Factory, which opened its first outlet store there in 1972.

The British earldom, curiously, may have something to do with the naming of Burlington,Conn. What’s curious is that Burlington, Conn., a breakaway parish of Bristol, was granted status as a town in 1806.

“Although America was independent from Great Britain for three decades,” writes Clifford Thomas Alderman in “A Brief History of Burlington, Conn.,” on the town’s website, “tradition holds that the new name for West Britain was chosen by the General Assembly to honor England’s third Earl of Burlington.”

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Why Connecticut legislators would have wanted to pay homage to a member of the British gentry who died more than a half-century before is anybody’s guess.

Tens of thousands of Vermonters emigrated to points west from the late 18th to the mid-19th century — farmers looking for better land, young men for better opportunities, and so on. The many reasons included the rise and fall of the sheep industry, as detailed by Dartmouth College historian Lewis Stilwell in “Migration from Vermont” (1948).

Vermonters settled in colonies in western New York, and in states farther west as transportation improved. Stilwell called the exodus of the 1830s a “great migration,” and the outflow continued over the next two decades.

According to Stilwell, “Of the Vermonters in the United States in 1860, 42 percent were living outside Vermont.” Many of the outgoing settlers kept moving. Stilwell notes that some place names “migrated twice” — “Middlebury, Michigan, derived through Middlebury, New York, from Middlebury, Vermont; and the Woodstock in Minnesota tracing its genealogy to the Green Mountains by way of Woodstock, Illinois.”

Other examples: Burlington, Okla., in Alfalfa County, was named for Burlington, Iowa, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Burlington, Colo., according to the Colorado Historical Society, was so named in 1887 because many of the early residents came from Burlington, Kansas. (Both the Iowa and Kansas Burlingtons, in turn, were named for the one in Vermont, as detailed below.)

Then there’s Burlington, N.D. According to the historical summary on the town’s website, the first post office was approved in 1883, and “It was decided to call the place Burlington, after the home town of Frank Hatton, assistant postmaster general.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but which Burlington was Hatton from — the one in Iowa? Wisconsin? Vermont?

“Nobody seems to know,” said Delvin Stemen, who has lived in Burlington, N.D., since 1942 and who fields historical questions like this.

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Michigan has two Burlington townships, in Calhoun and Lapeer counties. Neither county history explains where the name came from, but the Calhoun County account does identify several early settlers from Vermont. According to a book of Michigan place names, the Calhoun County Burlington was named by two brothers (Ansel and William Adams) who moved there in 1833. Where they came from is unclear, but they supposedly fought in the War of 1812 and named the town after “a Union gunboat that fought on the Great Lakes” in that war. That story may be apocryphal — there’s no record of a U.S. Navy boat of that name from that era.

The Lapeer County history’s discussion of Burlington township, established in 1855, notes the “fertile soil” and features a big illustration of “an imported cow,” apparently a Holstein.

Of the Burlingtons named for the one in Vermont, Burlington, Iowa, deserves special attention — partly because it looks rather familiar, and partly because it was seminal in its own right.

In 1834 John B. Gray, who came from Burlington, Vt., with his family and bought the first lot in the newly surveyed town, named the place for his hometown. So we learn from the Des Moines County Historical Society. If you do a Google search for “Burlington, Iowa & photos,” several old postcard images turn up with red-brick cityscapes and church steeples that are tantalizingly reminiscent of our own downtown Burlington.

Burlington, Iowa’s importance in propagating Burlingtons derives from a railroad. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad came into existence in 1855, even before there was a bridge across the Mississippi River to Iowa. The Iowa Burlington was added to the company name anyway, apparently in a fit of corporate optimism that eventually proved justified, as rail lines spanned the Midwest. (The Mississippi bridge was built in 1868.) The company came to be commonly known as “The Burlington”, and its network, “The Burlington Route.”The name survived in a 1970 railroad merger that resulted inThe Burlington Northern.

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Some Burlingtons got their name from the railroad. Among them are Burlington Junction, Mo.and Burlington, Wyoming.

The Burlington, Wis., Historical Society has a letter from Vermonter E.D. Putnam that describes a meeting he attended in 1836 at the site of the new town, where he had surveyed the land and laid out the lots. The meeting was led by Enoch D. Woodbridge, who was from Vergennes, Vt. Putnam’s letter reads in part:

“After dinner was over, the subject of naming the town was discussed, and as no one proposed a name, Mr. Woodbridge who acted as chairman, said that inasmuch as I had done all that had been done there, I ought to have the honor of naming the place. ... I was taken wholly by surprise, as I had not even thought of a name; but after a moment’s thought I said that the State of Vermont, from which I came, had one town celebrated above all others for the beauty of its location and the scenery, I would propose the name of that town — Burlington — as a name for this new town... It was decided in affirmation by a unanimous vote, and three rousing cheers were given ...”

So much for the Burlingtons of unimpeachable Vermont lineage. We’re left with a few nobody-can-be-sure-why-they’re-called-that Burlingtons, starting with — believe it or not — the one in history-obsessed Massachusetts.

This much we know about the origin of Burlington, Mass., courtesy of town archivist Dan McCormack: In 1799, a group of settlers split off from the town of Woburn, and “somehow, the town fathers settled on the name Burlington.”

“No one has been able to figure out why,” McCormack said. That’s saying something, coming from a town that has its own archivist.

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“There has been a lot of speculation over the years,” McCormack added.

The same may be true of Burlington, Maine, incorporated in 1832, which was “named for a Massachusetts town,” according to the town’s website.

Another kind of uncertainty hovers over Burlington, Ind., located in “a very unique section of Carroll County, Indiana,” according to Mark A. Smith, coordinator of the county historical museum.

“As I understand it,” Smith wrote in an email, “the town was named for the Wyandotte Chief Burlington.” Sure enough, a Google search turns up an alphabetical list of “Native American Place Names in Indiana” with this line:

“Burlington – Named for Wyandotte Indian, Chief Burlington.”

That seems like an odd name for an Indian chief. Was there really a chief by that name? The question was put by email to Wyandotte Nation.

“Not in any of our records,” replied Sherri Clemmons, the historian.

We come now to North Carolina and another mystery. There was a railroad town in that state that somehow wound up being called Company Shops, and by 1886, the popular sentiment was that the name had to go. In favor of what?

Someone in the Knights of Labor who was partial to both Carolina and Philadelphia suggested Carolinadelphia, but that didn’t fly. At some point, a committee of seven men took all the suggestions, went into a meeting, and came out with a unanimous choice: Burlington! How did they choose Burlington? Nobody knows. No minutes were taken.

In the years that followed, according to a local history by Walter Boyd, various theories were propounded. One was that the name came from ... a Vermont bovine.

According to a 1936 newspaper account quoted by Boyd: “Prior to 1887... a fine Jersey bull was purchased by a group of Alamance County farmers from a farm near Burlington, Vt. The bull arrived here and was forthwith called ‘Burlington.’ It seems no effort was made to pen up the animal ... It was quite common for ‘Burlington’ to plod from Graham to Company Shops several times a week... It was considered a lark to ride his back from town to town. He became a landmark.”

Another newspaper article offered this description: “This bull was really monarch of all he surveyed, for he visited the herds in Graham and Company Shops ... and became a terror though greatly admired.”

Before Vermont’s Jersey fans get too excited, they should read this one of Boyd’s cautionary footnotes: “It should be noted, however, that several have questioned whether ‘Burlington’ ever existed.” There are other speculative answers to the why-Burlington question — including one that invokes the courtship of the governor’s daughter by the chairman of the town-naming committee — but they’re not as much fun.